Communication activities such as face to face meetings are a large part of the typical businessman's daily activities. It is recognize that a meeting with all the necessary parties, which allows a spontaneous exchange of information is often the spark which leads to important decisions. However, there is a great desire to avoid the cost, dislocation delays and inconveniences associated with travel. While voice telephone communication is readily available for long distance communication, it is limited in the types of information which can be transmitted. While there have been many efforts in the past to provide automated communication facilities which integrate voice and image data, relative few of these system are commercially available. The systems are expensive and typically require high speed phone lines as well as special video equipment.
Many conferencing systems have been proposed in the prior art. All of these system, while providing image data in addition to voice data, require dedicated proprietary hardware. All parties must have the same equipment and are often medium specific. A given prior art system may operate effectively on telephone lines, yet have no provision for local area network or other data line communication. The necessity for specialized hardware has limited the appeal and acceptance of the prior art conferencing systems. Other deficiencies in the prior art include the limitation of the sources of image data transmitted to the remote data processing systems. A particular conferencing system will contain provisions for input from hand drawn messages from a digitizing tablet, but will contain no provision for image input from scanners or other nonvolatile storage of images. Other prior art systems may contain provisions for facsimile or video data, but contain no provision for hand writing data. These deficiencies might be overcome if it were possible to link several of the prior art systems together. However, the prior art methods typically operate in closed environments, i.e., they do not interact with other software or hardware, thus preventing the importation of facilities from other transmission devices or software.
In view of the deficiencies of the known prior art it would be advantageous to provide a method and generalized apparatus which allows multiple users to carry on long distance conferencing activities independent of special hardware. Optimally, the apparatus and method would allow input from a variety of graphical and image sources, as well as providing an open architecture to take advantage of feature not originally programmed or provided and to keep up with future advances in image devices and hardware.